Researching Your Family Tree

Researching your family tree can be a huge undertaking for anyone. It involves lots of detailed work and a lot of searching and investigating, sometimes looking into literally hundreds of leads. The first thing you're going to need to be is organized.

If you're lucky like me your family saved everything. We even have our great-great grandfathers birth certificate from England. We have letters from the early 1900's written by the English relatives to the American relatives. We had several dozens of pictures, old postcards, newspaper clippings and the like. The first thing we did was buy sheet protectors for these precious old items to protect them from the use they were getting.

The next thing that you're going to want to get is an ancestral chart. These ancestral charts are easy to find and free to download off of the computer. They are generally what are considered "traditional pedigree charts" with room for up to 5 generations of information.

As you start getting into the process of looking up information on your ancestors you'll eventually ends up with lots of papers. You'll want to keep them organized and safely stored in one place. It's suggested that you use a folders, one for each "family" that you are investigating. This is a safe way to store birth records and death records, newspaper clips, etc. Also, write down any information that you are given from various sources on each family member and keep it in these folders. You will want to keep detailed contact information on each person or organization you contact in your search in case you have more questions and need to contact them again.

You'll be amazed as you use the internet to do online searches at the amount of information available to you. There are records from the Civil War, records from WWI and WWII, records from New England dating back to the 1790's. There are passenger lists from ships that sailed to America from Ireland in the 1700's.

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